The many histories of the Kelly Gang
Martin Flanagan
28 March 2003
The Age
source: theage.com.au

From the outset, there were two versions of the Kelly story. One was carried in the newspapers and magazines of the day. While this was not always laudatory of the government or police, implicit in the press’s view were certain assumptions about the law that placed the Kellys firmly outside it, usually casting them as low thieves and murderers. The other version, in which the gang were heroes, was carried in song.

The controversy around Ned never went away for long. The film, The Story of the Kelly Gang, was shot in 1906 and is usually described as Australia’s first feature film. In an essay on the genre of bushranger films that it spawned, Melbourne writer William Routt quotes film exhibitor T.J.West announcing in March 1911 that "for the country’s good, West’s will not, in the future, show Australian bushranging films". In Routt’s view, West’s stand marked the beginning of the end for the genre.

But Ned kept re-appearing. During World War I, Sir John Monash, Australia’s most distinguished general, gained kudos among his troops from the story that, as a 14-year-old boy, he had been in Jerilderie the day it was stuck up by the Kelly gang. In journalistic terms, the major contribution of this period, little noticed at the time but now much prized by collectors, was the publication of The Inner History of the Kelly Gang in 1929.

Written with passionate eloquence by J.J.Kenneally, a teacher who had grown up in that part of north-eastern Victoria still sometimes called Kelly country, the book juxtaposed police statements at the time of the Kelly break-out, and during the events leading up to it, with the findings of the 1881 Royal Commission of Inquiry into the Victorian Police. It is a fact that many of the policemen involved in the saga were subsequently demoted and pensioned off or, in the case of Constable Fitzpatrick, with whom the outbreak can be said to have started, dismissed from the force on the grounds that he "could not be trusted out of sight".

Kenneally’s book used previously unpublished information given to the author by Tom Lloyd, the so-called fifth member of the gang, and finished, volcanically, with a review by Ned’s sole surviving brother, Jim, then aged 70. Jim Kelly’s review is one long bellow of rage at the injustice visited upon his family by the police. No less intense is his dislike for "mercenary writers" and imposters seeking to profit from retellings of the story. Particularly offended by a novel of the day titled The Girl Who Helped Ned Kelly, Jim declared: "My brother Ned was so devoted to his mother he had no ‘girl’."

In the course of World War II, a writer named Max Brown thought he discerned an Australian character that was distinct and original. When he traced the character back to its archetype, he arrived at the figure of Ned. The foreword to his book, first published in 1948 as Australian Son, remains one of the most perceptive essays written on the Kelly phenomenon. Afire with idealism for the project, he had journeyed to north-eastern Victoria to immerse himself in the detail of the story.

Three months later, by his own account "bitterly disappointed", he realised, "The hands of the dead had reached out to keep the silence. Already I knew there were gaps in the Kelly history I could not mend, as well as major issues concerning which accounts were opposed. Time, class interest and perversity had done their job, I realised, finally, that the truth I once regarded as absolute was largely relative."

Ned could not be known then, and he certainly cannot be known now. That is one source of his eerie power. At every vital turn in the saga there are at least two versions of what occurred. What remains vivid, however, are his symbols. In what was then, and is again now, a largely derivative culture, Ned’s was a bold native imagining and, while his story is deeply rooted in place, it asks universal questions. Was Ned a rebel or was he an outlaw? Was he a freedom fighter or - as was alleged in this newspaper shortly after September 11 - was he a terrorist?

Around the same time as Brown went looking for the real Ned and found himself grasping at shadows, a great artist with an eagle eye for Australian culture (and who happened to have read The Inner History of the Kelly Gang) was putting a similar perception to Brown’s to a spectacularly different end. No film or novel can match the power of Sidney Nolan’s Kelly paintings because, ultimately, any attempt at telling the Kelly story must settle on a certain version of the facts.

Nolan understood the power of Ned’s ambiguity. We never meet his Ned face to face: he is the masked figure on the edge of the Australian psyche. But Nolan’s Kelly paintings were also wholly original landscapes that made no attempt to please the eye in any conventional way. Nolan’s Australia was bright and bare and hard; we may not feel we belonged in such a place, but the figure in the steel mask somehow did.

Around the same time, in north-western Australia, the Yarralin people were telling a story that said that Captain Cook took Ned back to England where his throat was cut. As recorded in Deborah Bird Rose’s Dingo Makes Us Human, the story continues: "They bury him. Leave him. Sun go down, little bit dark now, he left this world. BOOOOOMMMMM! Go longa top. This world shaking. All the white men been shaking. They all been frightened." Ned had entered the Dreamtime.

Ned’s critics, as intransigent today as ever, usually give vent to their feeling by describing him as a murderer and a cattle thief. In so far as this is meant to imply he was nothing but a common criminal, they are wrong. Ned took on the state. He plotted to abduct the Governor of Victoria, the Marquis of Normandy, and offer him in exchange for his imprisoned mother. The tactics the gang employed at Glenrowan were similar to those employed by the Boers 15 years later in South Africa and Ian Jones, commonly regarded as the leading Kelly historian of our day, is in no doubt that Glenrowan was intended to spark an uprising aimed at establishing a republic in north-east Victoria.

In 1974, Englishman Tony Richardson made a version of the story starring Mick Jagger as Ned. It’s a better film than its reputation would have you believe (one derisive story has is it that an aluminium helmet had to be made for Jagger as he was unable to keep the steel one aloft). Richardson understood that songs were basic to the Kelly tradition, even if he employed an American, Waylon Jennings, to sing them. Essentially, in Richardson’s view, the Kelly gang is Jumping Jack Flash and three young mates galloping through the bush, planning one big concert before it’s over.

More recently, there have been two major novels. It is from the first of these, Robert Drewe’s Our Sunshine, that the latest film has supposedly been made but what that means is hard to say. The novel’s appeal is the zest and flair of its language and Drewe’s Ned bears little resemblance to actor Heath Ledger’s finely judged portrayal of a sober young man poised between thought and action.

Drewe’s Ned is a late-20th-century character viewing an improbable fate descend upon him with irony and humour. The author even has a circus present during the gang’s final climactic hours in the Glenrown Hotel. The most interesting character in Drewe’s book is Aaron Sherritt, the man who believes in nothing and trusts his smile and dancing feet can get him through anything.

The later novel, Peter Carey’s The True History of the Kelly Gang, has been rightly praised for the brilliant language the author has constructed from the manifesto written by Ned and/or Joe Byrne, known as the Jerilderie letter. Or is it any wonder that Carey’s book won acceptance in America. Carey’s Ned is Huckleberry Finn with no river to escape on, a man confronted at every turn by an impossible history who finally stands and rises to his full height, a pistol in each hand.

In contrast to Drewe’s book, Carey’s Aaron Sherritt is an admirable character, a man prepared to risk his life to save his one true mate, Joe Byrne. Given Ned’s benigness, the character who differs most in Carey’s version from earlier retellings is Joe Byrne. Usually depicted as a bush Keats, half in love with easeful death, Carey’s Joe is an opium-addicted killer.

Drewe’s Ned has a wholly improbable fling with an English squatter’s wife. Carey goes one long step further, his book being written by Ned for his daughter by his de facto wife. The effect is to domesticate Ned and re-awaken the words of that incendiary literary critic, Jim Kelly: "My brother Ned was so devoted to his mother he had no ‘girl’." Ned became the man of the house at 13. Imagine Oedipus finding his mother not married to the King but oppressed by the Crown and you sense the wildness behind the final words of the Jerilderie letter: "I am a widow’s son outlawed and my orders must (underlined) be obeyed".

The effect of the two most recent films is to portray the Kelly myth as a case of the English versus the Irish. In each film, the Kellys, and those around them, speak with Irish accents. I am not persuaded they did. (There are people who would know. Jim Kelly lived until 1948. Ten years ago at Greta, I met a woman who had known him as a child.) In the new film, Irishness is also projected as a single identity but the subtext of the Kelly story is that the Irish in colonial Australia came in two colours, Orange and Green.

Ulster Protestants were then prominent in the Victoria Police while the leading Irish Protestant in Victorian society was Sir Redmond Barry, the judge who sent Ned’s mother Ellen Kelly to prison and two years later engaged in a famous verbal joust with Ned while sentencing him to be hanged. (Ned said he would see Sir Redmond in the place to which he was going; 12 days after Ned was hanged, Sir Redmond died of a poisoned carbuncle on his neck.)

Ned’s father was described by J. J. Kenneally as a true Irish patriot, but contemporary historians are not so sure. There’s a suggestion that when Red Kelly arrived as a convict in Van Diemen’s Land, he had the reputation of being a police informer - that is, a compromised man. Afterwards, in Melbourne, he met 18-year-old Ellen Quinn whose history was quite unlike his own. The Quinns were not convicts, they were not broken by the system. They were Irish Catholics from Ulster; there is reason to believe Ned Kelly would be better called Ned Quinn.

What the films miss are the Australianess of the story. Ned was born the year of the Eureka Stockade. His early years, the ones when his accent would have formed, were spent in that central corridor of Victoria that was awash with traffic to and from the goldfields. A spirit of optimism and revolt was in the air. No less than James Dean or the Beatles, Ned was of a generation. Ned said he and his friends would ride bold, fearless and free through the land. When the police moved against the Greta mob, it was specifically to take "the flashness out of them".

There was less than a fortnight between Ned being sentenced to death and executed, but in that period a petition for clemecy circulated in Melbourne, which then had a population of about 300,000, obtained 32,000 signatures. Ned’s appeal had already transcended ethnicity and religion. An Australian legend was being born.